


19

by Writer_47



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:34:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26533678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Writer_47/pseuds/Writer_47
Summary: During lockdown, Roman is told Gerri has been taken to hospital with covid.
Relationships: Gerri Kellman/Roman "Romulus" Roy
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	19

It’s mid-afternoon when he hears, waking up groggy and disorientated because his entire body is out of whack. Long nights spent awake, somehow it’s easier to pretend things are normal in the dark, watching movies on loop, drinking, eating take-away. Just another long weekend.

Only it isn’t.

Days are harder. It’s silent out on the street by his building. The odd car that passes sounds eerie and out of place. So he sleeps late, eats lunch, works out in his gym, showers, catches up on the news and then sleeps the afternoon away.

He isn’t used to being silent.

Sometimes he wishes he hadn’t broken it off with Tabitha. Least she’d be company.

And then, four in the afternoon, and a text from Frank which weirds him out immediately because he wasn’t even sure that old bastard knew how to use a phone.

‘Gerri in hospital with it.’

Gerri.

He had spoken to her only the previous week. Spoken isn’t the right word. He had rung her up, 23:17, and she’d answered, as awake as he was. He’d been lying on his couch staring at the black of his television screen, tucked away in the den, and her on his mind. He kept trying to remember how she smelt, how her perfume would fall around him in meetings distracting and enticing. Her face was easier to recall because if he googled she was there, some corporate shot where she looked warm and golden and prim in her suit. News reels of her in DC next to that waste of a wank Tom; and she’d shone.

When he closes his eyes, he thinks of touching her hair. Only once. There on the yacht. The one time in his cabin where she’d come to ask him if he was okay after Turkey and he’d made up some bullshit joke, but she hadn’t smiled and neither had he, and she’d said ‘I’m here, should you want to talk,’ and made to leave and he’d made to let her, only he didn’t, he touched her hair where it curled by her shoulder and she hadn’t stopped him. She’d let him.

That was it.

No move to kiss her – and he should have fucking done that. He should have said more. Done more. He tortures himself with imagined scenarios of kissing her.

Lockdown alone is no fun and he’s had two months of it now; knows she has too.

They speak at least once a week, usually mid-morning, catch up on work mostly in those first weeks. As it goes on they speak for longer, one day his phone recorded a 111 minutes on one call. He can’t recall what they spoke of, it doesn’t matter, but she’d laughed, he remembered that.

And then night. Once or twice feeling brave enough or drunk enough or lonely enough to press her name and breathe heavily to her as she whispers to him. He imagines her lying on her couch too when he calls, perhaps under a blanket, hopes her hand wanders and she touches herself thinking of him.

At the start of these calls they’d hang up almost immediately after he came. Now they breathed together after, there was something soothing about that. Her voice was as gentle as clouds in the middle of summer, as deep and luxurious as wading into the ocean. He wants to bathe in it, in her.

He’s not sure what makes him think it’s a good idea or that he’ll be able to get to her. He isn’t family and restrictions are in place. But his car turns up when he orders and he heads to the private hospital where he finds out she is. Bargains and argues and bullies until they agree to let him to her. He doesn’t give a fuck about transference.

She looks smaller in a hospital bed. Hooked up to a ventilator. Her skin is as pale and translucent as the first winter snow. Those astonishing eyes closed to him. Body so still his heart gasps at the thought she could die.

She could die.

There is nothing between them really. Nothing concrete. Nothing said or made real, only in his head, only this feeling he has that perhaps there is a connection there, a bond. As if she is the drum that is in his heart maintaining the rhythm. He wants to get in her head and delve, discover if she feels anything for him at all, beyond what she can get by partnering with him – he’s dumb, but not that dumb.

She is without jewellery and he thinks how small and unremarkable her hands are. Nothing special apart from the fact they are hers and everything about her is so unbelievably perfect and he is not worthy of touching her because she’s like some shining goddess in every room she enters.

But they’re alone now and she’s the first person he’s seen outside of takeaway deliveries since this fucking shit started.

So he holds her hand. Watches as she breathes in and out. Every shuddering breath, every beep of the machine means she’s still there.

The plastic of the room at odds with who she is. Sterile and unfeeling. He saw on the news that people were dying alone, relatives saying their farewells over facetime and it didn’t hit him how horrifying that was until he’s sitting here now. It’s bad, she’s bad, on a ventilator and weak and who fucking knows what will happen and what if of all the people in the world that love her he’s the last one sitting here with her as she takes her final breath.

_Dear God._

He doesn’t believe in religions.

_Dear God, don’t let her go just yet. There’s more to do, more I need to say to her, more minutes I need to pass in her company. Please, just let her stay_.

He’d swap their positions if he could. Do it for her.

Her face looks composed and calm and he spends hours studying it, noting lines he never saw, usually because they were never this close for so long. Absent of make-up and the armour of her clothes. She is human. Frail now. He wonders what this is doing to her insides, eating away at her lungs, wonders why she never texted to tell him she was ill in the early stages and where are her daughters and does she have a wider family. There isn’t much comfort he can offer and besides he’s not even sure she can hear.

Four hours in he marches out to bombard whomever he meets with questions, demands to know what treatment she’s getting because he’ll pay for whatever, fly in whatever. He’s being an asshole and he knows it, trying to argue though his mask, flapping his arms around in the protective clothing they’d given him like the jerk he is. But the nurse gives him tea and a book and he returns to her room, the stillness of her room, the reassuring beat of the machine telling him she’s still here.

And he reads. He’s a shit reader, always has been, eyes move too fast and too far along the page and he trips over his words and self-corrects and pauses in the wrong places and she’d tut if she was awake, take the book from him and do it right. But it’s something to do and he hopes she can hear.

Thousands have died in New York. Thousands and thousands. She would be another number, another name on a list, another body being shipped out to the morgue.

But not to him.

He doesn’t think she knows that. They’ve just been playing this fun little game. An entertainment, something to pass the time, something on the wrong side of acceptability. She doesn’t know how he clings to it.

He will tell her when she wakes. When this is all over, he’ll take her out to dinner, and she can wear some fabulous black dress and diamonds at her ears, and they’ll share wine and conversation and laugh together like normal people do.

The ache in his neck is what wakes him, and then the movement in the room, sudden and the alerts, voices, machines beeping, and he’s shuffled out of the way. A sea of yellow plastic as they lean over her, all these people touching her and fussing her. Drop in blood pressure. They turn her body until she is on her stomach, watch the machines with glassy eyes and it isn’t until they all breathe easily that he realises that was almost it, almost the end, her body could have given up.

It didn’t.

‘She might not make it.’

Those words through a mask, a plastic face covering, and clearly words that the Doctor has said one time too many over the months.

‘Just be prepared for that.’

He doesn’t have tears to shed. Has never been that person. There’s a text from Shiv, part of their daily routine, and he doesn’t have the energy to try and explain why he’s risking his life by sitting in a hospital by Gerri’s bed. Nor that he doesn’t intend to leave until she wakes up and speaks to him.

He reads a few more chapters to her. Sleeps again. Finds in the morning a different nurse brings him coffee.

Every hour she’s still breathing is an hour she’s still alive, still with him.


End file.
